I have been troubleshooting WordPress today as I have noticed a couple issues:

1. On my first Hello World blog I noticed when using an apostrophe it had a strange behavior. It keeps adding additional apostrophes every time I save. So if I wrote I’m, it would change it into I”m. If I saved the blog again it would change to I””m.

2. Downloading and upgrading plugins would fail with “Could not create Temporary file.”

It turns out that problem #1 is not a WordPress issue but a PHP setting issue. I found this site which explains how to disable Magic Quotes. Just had to add “php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off” to my .htaccess file and no more issues.

The solution to Problem #2 was not as nice. Tried numerous things from the support thread but in the end the only thing that works was changing the permissions for the wp-content folder to 777, perform the updates, and then revert the permissions back to 755. Not ideal but I suppose I won’t be updating and download plugins that often.

I was able to easily add the Twitter integration to pull from @toddmoore using the “Wickett Twitter Widget” Plugin. It was so simple that I highly recommended it. My previous WordPress blog suffered from a lot of SPAM in the comments so I also enabled the Akismet plugin to manage it.

I think WordPress and the various plugins are great.